The Circulation of Minor Passions: Uncertainty and the Media Experience

This lecture will design a roadmap for theorizing “minor passions” as they relate to our everyday involvement with media. The lecture will consider viewers’ insignificant, ordinary feelings of discomfort that often stay below the radar, such as boredom, weariness, disorientation, irritation, disengagement, and failure.

Contrary to the shared interpretation of discomfort as counterproductive or even harmful, these affects might, in fact, be useful, since they enable viewers to take a temporary break from the demands of the world and to adjust to our current “structure of feelings,” which is marked by the diffuse threat of uncertainty: the perpetual belief that a crisis is bound to occur. The circulation of precariousness, frustrated expectations, stimulus overload and digital fatigue will be linked with the global feelings of anxiety, as social, political, ecological, and health crises prevail. The lecture will explore how such “minor passions” circulate and sometimes “stick” across bodies, technologies, and media texts.

Marta Boni is Full Professor in the Department of Art History, Cinema and Audiovisual Media at the Université de Montréal (Canada). Her research examines television in the era of digital platforms from a pragmatic and cultural perspective. She has edited World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries (2017) and Formes et plateformes de la télévision à l’ère du numérique (2020), as well as a monograph on uncertainty in contemporary serial narratives, Perdre pied. Le principe d’incertitude dans les séries (2023).